In his latest exhibition at l.art gallery, Salzburg, Clemens Wolf extends his exploration of the tension between surface, structure, and absence. The works on view oscillate between painterly gesture and sculptural presence, transforming the gallery into a space charged with both material density and ephemeral traces.

Wolf’s practice often begins with a fascination for decay, erosion, and disappearance. The series of blue-and-white relief-like paintings, resembling imprints or ghostly negatives of natural environments, translate these processes into an image-making strategy. What at first appears as abstract surface patterning slowly reveals itself as a fragile record of landscape—an index of what has vanished, as much as what remains. Executed in deep ultramarine tones, these works summon a dialogue with art historical traditions of monochrome painting while insisting on their own contemporary urgency.

In contrast, the large-scale draped canvases in electric blue, acid yellow, and luminous violet activate the physicality of painting as object. Their folded, stretched, and gloss-coated surfaces suggest both fragility and resilience—paint as skin, as covering, as residue of process. Here, Wolf treats the canvas not as a flat support but as a living material, subjected to pressure, force, and suspension. The folds recall stage curtains, industrial tarps, or emergency blankets, situating the work at the threshold between protection and exposure.

The multi-colored, high-relief compositions mounted on the stone wall push this sculptural tendency further. Iridescent layers of resin, foil, and pigment appear as if frozen mid-collision, suspended between collapse and crystallization. Their garish beauty resists easy harmony, embodying a tension between attraction and discomfort. A suspended bundle of bright pink fabric intensifies this instability—an object caught between painting, installation, and body.

Elsewhere, Wolf reduces the palette to a visceral monochrome: a large red work, dense and raw, in which pigment and surface tension create an image at once vibrant and violent. Its immediacy contrasts with the cool, reflective quality of the blue works, reminding viewers of the breadth of emotional registers embedded in color itself.

Taken together, the exhibition underscores Clemens Wolf’s interest in thresholds: between image and object, order and accident, construction and entropy. His works capture the moment where control gives way to material autonomy, where surfaces carry the memory of processes no longer visible. At l.art gallery, painting becomes both stage and actor—a site where fragility and resilience perform their endless interplay.